Dick Beardsley

(This piece is for my latest book titled Pacesetters: Runners Who Informed Me Best and Inspired Me Most. I am posting an excerpt here each week, this one from December 1989.)

BEARDSLEY'S INJURIES. Dick Beardsley had two big wishes. Both came true.

Beardsley wanted to be one of America’s best marathoners. He became the second-fastest ever.

Dick grew up in the Minneapolis suburbs but wanted to be a dairy farmer. He used his running earnings to buy his first farm, knowing that his work there might cut into his future earning power as a runner.

His two peaceful-seeming professions both proved to be risky businesses for him. When we first met in 1981, Dick limped up to introduce himself.

“A pack of farm dogs attacked me while I was running on the country roads,” he said. He later told of an old knee injury suffered in a kick from a cow.

Dick had run a marathon in the 2:09s between the cow kick and the dogs’ attack. Only two other Americans had run faster then, so this time made Dick a star.

But he didn’t act like one. He had charm, wit and innocence often missing in the stars from any field. The aw-shucks, gee-whiz farm boy in Dick put him high on every runner’s list of favorites.

We met a second time in April 1982, at Boston. He had just been part of the greatest two-man marathon finish to date.

He and Alberto Salazar had raced side by side the whole way. Dick looked fresher in the home stretch, but Salazar dug deeper to win by two seconds.

They ran 2:08:52 and 2:08:54 that day. Those were the two fastest times in U.S. history.

Before I could congratulate him, Dick gave me a big hug. It was more a glad-to-see-you than a didn’t-I-do-great hug.

His success came and went quickly. He probably never recovered from his best race, because soon afterward he developed an achilles-tendon problem.

That injury required surgery in 1983 and more cutting a year later. He missed the 1984 Olympic Trials.

Hope surfaced again in 1987 when Dick ran 2:16:10 to qualify for the next Trials. But he realized then that “I was basically running on one leg” and that coming all the way back wasn’t possible.

He kept running. He finished a 50-mile race last year but had put aside his old racing ambitions.

By then he had bigger concerns. Farming always has been a gamble, and never more so than for a young farmer starting up in the 1980s.

Dick was forced to sell his first farm. He moved his wife Mary and their adopted Central American son Andy to town, where Dick went to work selling dairy-farming supplies.

This Labor Day, at age 33, a dream of his came true a second time. He traded the relative ease and regular income of his sales job for the insecurity and seven-day work weeks of another dairy farm.

Writer Jim Ferstle saw him at the Twin Cities Marathon, where Dick helped with the radio coverage. Ferstle recalls, “He was dressed in coveralls, as if he’d just come from the farm and would be going right back.”

A few weeks later, while he worked on the farm, the pant-leg of coveralls caught in the power-takeoff shaft of his tractor. His leg was pinned to the shaft while it continued to whir, slamming him repeatedly to the ground before he somehow shut of the power.

He had parked the tractor on grass. If it had sat on a hard surface, the blows to his head probably would have been fatal.

As it was, he suffered multiple injuries. The worst was to his left knee, which took the brunt of the violent twisting. Damage to the ligaments, cartilages and tendons was massive, and the knee will be rebuilt surgically.

The rehab period will be long, and maybe never complete. It will test the sunny disposition of this most positive of runners.

UPDATE. Dick Beardsley amazed his doctors. So well did they repair his mangled leg that he ran a race six months after the accident.

But his troubles didn’t end there. This and later accidents left him addicted to pain medications and under arrest for forging prescriptions.

That episode led to his current career as a motivational speaker and author of the tell-all book Staying the Course: A Runner’s Toughest Race.

Dick returned to marathoning and eventually ran in the low 2:40s. These days he probably logs the highest mileage anyone ever has on two artificial knees.

I’ve heard him speak many times, never more memorably than at a high school assembly in Selah, Washington. The kids were skeptical at first about what a runner could tell them, but Dick won them over with his humor and honesty.

Now living in Texas with his second wife Jill, Dick runs on two replaced knees. He remains one of the few Americans ever to break 2:10 twice in the marathon.

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. Latest released was Going Far. Other titles: Home Runs, Joe’s Journal, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Memory Laps, Pacesetters, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, and Starting Lines, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]